What I Was
A Novel
by Meg Rosoff
Overview
From the Publisher
In 1962, a 16-year-old boy is dropped off by his father at a boarding school on the windswept coast of East Anglia. It is a model of its kind–the rooms are freezing, the food is disgusting, the older boys are sadistic, and the masters are the ineffectual, damaged castoffs of a dying Empire.
But the boy is used to the drill and well practiced at detached dreaming, imagining himself someone else, somewhere else. Until one day, falling behind one of the regular runs along the coast, he meets Finn.
Finn seems like a character from a novel, or a dream. Dressed in clothes that look the way they did a century before, Finn lives alone with his cat in a tiny fisherman’s hut. The two become friends, the boy risking scandalous rumour and expulsion from school.
But the idyll cannot last, disaster invades from all sides, and the boy discovers that nothing has been what he believed.
What I Was will cement Meg Rosoff’s reputation as a writer of extraordinary skill and sensitivity, who recreates with uncanny exactness the passions of youth.
My thoughts
I first previewed this book at Bamm.com when they sent out a week's worth of reading via their free email newsletters. The category this book came through on was pre-publication. I was hooked from the first page and immediately went to eBay where I was able to purchase an advance, uncorrected proof. I'm not happy that I paid for a book that is clearly labeled "Not for Sale" but I don't know what I was expecting since the book hadn't officially been released yet.
Regardless of those issues, the book was phenomenal! There is a huge surprise part way through the book that I didn't see coming at all! In retrospect of course I should have seen it. The writing was on the wall. But it caught me by such surprise that I squealed when I got to that part! Any book that makes me squeal has to be a good book, right?
This was an easy book to read - it only took a few hours - and it was the kind of book that kept me up too late at night and made me late to work! I loved it. I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next!
Favorite Passage
"Do you live here alone?"
He merely shrugged. There was a note of finality in the gesture, and I didn't dare ask my next question, namely: How on earth have you managed to live alone in a state of perfect grace, away from the local authority and the endless stream of oppressors who populate every minute of every normal life? Though we were all taught to be proud of living in this great parliamentary democracy, the civil servants who ran it were a fearsome bunch - a nameless mass of people with jobs (police, social workers, record-keepers, teachers, councilmen) whose sole purpose was to keep everyone shuffling from birth to death in a nice, orderly queue. Surely some social-service record had been passed to the local constabulary bearing a huge black question mark beside the name Finn, and the scrawled words "Why isn't this boy in school?"
